Tag: Apps

HIGHLIGHTS

Changes designed to make Twitter feel lighter, faster, and easier to use

Update brings bolder headlines and more intuitive icons

Users’ profile images changed from square-shaped to round

Twitter has unveiled a new look, and much like some previous changes the company has made to its short-messaging service, it’s not going over so well with the Twitterati.

“Today, with lots of feedback and ideas from you, we’re refreshing our product too and making it feel lighter, faster, and easier to use. We listened closely and kept what you love,” Twitter said in a blog post announcing the new design.

The San Francisco company says the new design emphasises simplicity, making it faster and easier to use, with bolder headlines and more intuitive icons. It also changed users’ profile images from square-shaped to round. On its apps and TweetDeck, tweets will “now update instantly with reply, Retweet, and like counts so you can see conversations as they’re happening,” Twitter added.

The company said the new user interface will roll out on twitter.com, Twitter for iOS, Twitter for Android, TweetDeck, and Twitter Lite in the coming days and weeks.

Twitter users immediately responded Thursday by tweeting jokes and memes critical of the changes. There were almost 30,000 tweets about the new user interface, or UI, within hours of the change, the vast majority of them either complaining about the new look or mocking it. A popular image was a suddenly round SpongeBob SquarePants.

Twitter also took heat from users last year when it changed its algorithm that orders the tweets users see. Users also tweeted their dismay when the company rolled out its Moments feature, and when it got rid of its star icon signifying a “favorite” tweet, in favor of a heart icon, similar to Facebook’s “like” button.

The redesign is Twitter’s latest attempt to freshen the messaging service, which has struggled to attract new users at the same pace as Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. Twitter revenue growth has stalled for years, and the company has cut costs and shuffled executives while still never posting a quarter of profit.

A third of people surveyed about their smartphones said apps made them spend at all hours and hit their finances.

They said the convenience made them spend more or lose track of money, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) survey suggested.

Two-thirds said apps made it easier to spend, particularly from bed at the start or the end of the day.

A separate report suggested that voice and gesture technology will transform the way we pay.

UK’s online shoppers top global spending survey

Teenagers ‘checking mobile phones in night’

Wary ‘silver surfers’ embrace social media

The Nationwide said that its survey suggested people were increasing comfortable with biometrics when paying. The building society said that futurologist Ian Pearson has said the next stage of convenience was within reach.

“Gesturing towards someone and saying: ‘Here is £13.46’ is quite enough to combine the voice and gesture recognition with the presence of your smartphone as electronic identification,” Dr Pearson said.

‘Thinking time’

The FSCS survey found the women asked said they typically spent £131 via apps during a month, while men spent £115.

Men were more likely to spend via apps on gambling, travel, socialising, entertainment and music, while women favoured food and shopping apps.

Mark Oakes, head of communications at the FSCS, said: “Being able to make purchases at the touch of a button removes the thinking time you would usually have if you were in a shop.

“It requires discipline to stay in control of your money, not only spending but also saving, but it’s worth doing. Setting aside just a little a month can add up to a big sum.”

HIGHLIGHTS

Update brings over 500 professionally drawn shapes

All three apps get auto-correction and text replacement

Some app-specific features have been added as well

Apple on Tuesday updated its iWork suite of apps that include Pages, Numbers, and Keynotes across macOS and iOS. The update adds a new library of over 500 professionally drawn shapes to all apps on both platforms along with some other new features and additions tailored for each OS.

The professionally drawn shapes can be found within categories like Objects, Education, Places, Activities, Animals, Nature, Food, Symbols, Transportation, Arts, People, and Work and across all the three iWork apps. The new categories can now be found with previously existing shapes and can be accessed by tapping on the plus icon in the navigation menu and selecting the shapes sub-category.

On macOS, apart from the new shapes, the new features common across all three iWork apps include the ability to reply to comments and join threaded conversations; new auto-correction and text replacement options; and Stock and Currency functions, which now returns data from the previous market day’s close. There’s also support for Hebrew and Arabic within Pages and Keynote.

The update to Keynotes on Mac will also bring new pan and zoom options, and you can now edit presenter notes while displaying slides in Light Table view. In Pages for Mac, iPhone and iPad, you can now add linked text boxes, export documents as fixed layout ePub books and change margins, headers, footers and paper size while collaborating. Numbers gets support for print preview.

On iOS, new common features across the three apps include the ability to reply to comments and join threaded conversations, and new auto-correction and text replacement options. The most notable additions include view options for Keynote and Pages. In Keynote for iOS, you will now be able to rearrange your slides with the new Light Table view, which will let you view all your slides on a grid. A similar feature can also be found in Pages, giving you a thumbnail view of each page of a document for easier navigation.

You can download the latest versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote for iOS and Mac from the App Store.

HIGHLIGHTS

The lists in the section will be refreshed quarterly

Android Excellence can be found in revamped Editor’s Choice section

The section promotes the content that follows Google’s guidelines

Google has introduced a new section in Google Play store called ‘Android Excellence’. This section is meant to promote apps that have great design, performance, or follow the best practices given by the search giant itself. The newly introduced Android Excellence section can be found in the revamped Editor’s Choice section and promotes content and provides recognition to the apps that follow “best practices,” as per the company.

The move comes a week after Apple announced that it’s completely revamping the App Store with iOS 11 to place greater focus on manual curation of apps, with daily updates in the form of lists, developer stories, and more.

“The new collections will showcase apps and games that deliver incredible user experiences on Android, use many of our best practices, and have great design, technical performance, localisation, and device optimisation,” Google said in its blog post.

Google says that the Android Excellence collections will be refreshed quarterly. Currently, some of the notable mentions in the first round Android Excellence Games include Hitman GO, Pictionary, Riptide GP: Renegade, and Toca Blocks. On the other hand, some of the noteworthy names in Android Excellence Apps include Evernote, Memrise, Pocket, and Skyscanner.

As the lists will be refreshed after a considerable time, it might not be the best place to find great new apps or games but the entries that make this list are likely to get abundance of promotion and exposure. This is likely to prove as a great incentive for app developers to follow the guidelines provided by Google for Android apps.

HIGHLIGHTS

More than 70 percent of smartphone apps are reporting personal data to third-party tracking companies like Google Analytics, the Facebook Graph API or Crashlytics, warns a new study.

When people install a new Android or iOS app, it asks the user’s permission before accessing personal information. Some of the information these apps are collecting are necessary for them to work properly: A map app wouldn’t be nearly as useful if it couldn’t use GPS data to get a location.

But once an app has permission to collect that information, it can share your data with anyone the app’s developer wants to – letting third-party companies track where you are, how fast you are moving and what you are doing.

To get a picture of what data are being collected and transmitted from people’s smartphones, the researchers from IMDEA Networks Institute in Spain developed a free Android app of their own, called the Lumen Privacy Monitor.

Because Lumen is about transparency, a phone user can see the information installed apps collect in real time and with whom they share these data.

“We try to show the details of apps’ hidden behaviour in an easy-to-understand way. It’s about research, too, so we ask users if they’ll allow us to collect some data about what Lumen observes their apps are doing – but that doesn’t include any personal or privacy-sensitive data,” the researchers said in a statement released by the institute.

This unique access to data allowed the researchers to study how mobile apps collect users’ personal data and with whom they share data at an unprecedented scale.

More than 1,600 people who have used Lumen since October 2015 allowed the researchers to analyse more than 5,000 apps.

“We discovered 598 internet sites likely to be tracking users for advertising purposes, including social media services like Facebook, large Internet companies like Google and Yahoo, and online marketing companies under the umbrella of internet service providers like Verizon Wireless,” the study said.

More than 70 percent of the apps were connected to at least one tracker, and 15 percent of them were connected to five or more trackers, the findings showed.

“Tracking users on their mobile devices is just part of a larger problem. More than half of the app-trackers we identified also track users through websites. Thanks to this technique, called ‘cross-device’ tracking, these services can build a much more complete profile of your online persona,” the researchers said.

HIGHLIGHTS

Users won’t need to use third-party apps for scanning QR codes

QR codes enable users to perform several actions with simple scanning

iOS 11 will be made widely available in fall

Apple has added native support for scanning QR codes to camera app in iOS 11, which means that users will not require a third-party application just to scan the Quick Response codes for day-to-day use. With the addition of this feature, new possibilities and uses cases will open up for users in terms of what they can do by simply scanning a QR code with their camera app.

9To5Mac has a compilation of the new features that iOS 11 camera app’s QR code support will enable. This includes adding contacts, adding events to calendars, as well as placing phone calls. With the native support for QR Code scanning in the iOS camera app, users will be able to perform these actions without having to switch to a third-party app, and leverage integration with the corresponding app like Contacts, Calendar, and Phone. Additionally, QR codes can be used to send emails with predefined email addresses and messages, search addresses, going to certain website addresses, and connecting to Wi-Fi networks.

Now hold on to that last bit, while configuring wireless networks using QR codes is definitely easier than manually adding the password, Apple has already introduced a new feature with iOS 11 that eliminates even the need of scanning QR code. With the newly added feature for easy Wi-Fi sharing, users can simply allow other users to join the network by giving permission with a single tap through another connected device.

Notably, QR Codes can also be created with callback-URLs, which allow users or third party applications to jump directly into certain specific areas within the app, the report points out. This means that users will be able to reach a particular part within the app by just scanning a particular QR code. This can enable new opportunities for app developers and offer convenience for users as well.

Users who are already on the developer preview for iOS 11 can start scanning right away while those who are still on earlier versions of the platform can currently use third-party applications till iOS 11 is eventually rolled out widely in Fall this year

HIGHLIGHTS

Update brings over 500 professionally drawn shapes

All three apps get auto-correction and text replacement

Some app-specific features have been added as well

Apple on Tuesday updated its iWork suite of apps that include Pages, Numbers, and Keynotes across macOS and iOS. The update adds a new library of over 500 professionally drawn shapes to all apps on both platforms along with some other new features and additions tailored for each OS.

The professionally drawn shapes can be found within categories like Objects, Education, Places, Activities, Animals, Nature, Food, Symbols, Transportation, Arts, People, and Work and across all the three iWork apps. The new categories can now be found with previously existing shapes and can be accessed by tapping on the plus icon in the navigation menu and selecting the shapes sub-category.

On macOS, apart from the new shapes, the new features common across all three iWork apps include the ability to reply to comments and join threaded conversations; new auto-correction and text replacement options; and Stock and Currency functions, which now returns data from the previous market day’s close. There’s also support for Hebrew and Arabic within Pages and Keynote.

The update to Keynotes on Mac will also bring new pan and zoom options, and you can now edit presenter notes while displaying slides in Light Table view. In Pages for Mac, iPhone and iPad, you can now add linked text boxes, export documents as fixed layout ePub books and change margins, headers, footers and paper size while collaborating. Numbers gets support for print preview.

On iOS, new common features across the three apps include the ability to reply to comments and join threaded conversations, and new auto-correction and text replacement options. The most notable additions include view options for Keynote and Pages. In Keynote for iOS, you will now be able to rearrange your slides with the new Light Table view, which will let you view all your slides on a grid. A similar feature can also be found in Pages, giving you a thumbnail view of each page of a document for easier navigation.

You can download the latest versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote for iOS and Mac from the App Store.

HIGHLIGHTS
The lists in the section will be refreshed quarterly
Android Excellence can be found in revamped Editor’s Choice section
The section promotes the content that follows Google’s guidelines
Google has introduced a new section in Google Play store called ‘Android Excellence’. This section is meant to promote apps that have great design, performance, or follow the best practices given by the search giant itself. The newly introduced Android Excellence section can be found in the revamped Editor’s Choice section and promotes content and provides recognition to the apps that follow “best practices,” as per the company.

The move comes a week after Apple announced that it’s completely revamping the App Store with iOS 11 to place greater focus on manual curation of apps, with daily updates in the form of lists, developer stories, and more.

“The new collections will showcase apps and games that deliver incredible user experiences on Android, use many of our best practices, and have great design, technical performance, localisation, and device optimisation,” Google said in its blog post.

Google says that the Android Excellence collections will be refreshed quarterly. Currently, some of the notable mentions in the first round Android Excellence Games include Hitman GO, Pictionary, Riptide GP: Renegade, and Toca Blocks. On the other hand, some of the noteworthy names in Android Excellence Apps include Evernote, Memrise, Pocket, and Skyscanner.

As the lists will be refreshed after a considerable time, it might not be the best place to find great new apps or games but the entries that make this list are likely to get abundance of promotion and exposure. This is likely to prove as a great incentive for app developers to follow the guidelines provided by Google for Android apps.